• @PriorProject
    9•11 months ago

    Click through to the top-growing new instance, lemmy.elest.io

    It has 12k registered users, which is like 1/3 or lemmy.world. But it only has 4 users online, or 0.1% of what’s online at lemmy.world right now. Parapheum has a similar massive imbalance in registered vs active users.

    I haven’t seen a satisfying description of what’s going on here, but one thing that isn’t going on is hundreds of thousands of users registering on ONLY these new instances and then not using Lemmy at all. These are synthetic accounts. Are they malicious? I dunno. They’re weird at least. There’s an admin listed on the frontpage of each instance, might be worth asking directly.

    • @PriorProject
      6•11 months ago

      If you filter the modlog by banned accounts you can see hundreds or thousands of accounts getting banned from the same instances: https://lemmy.world/modlog

      I also see another commenter posted a link with more context. So yeah, looks like spambots in force.

      • tal
        1•11 months ago

        I hope those accounts eventually get purged, or the spambots will eat up neat usernames for no reason.

        • @PriorProject
          1•11 months ago

          These generally appear to be empty instances, likely chosen because their admins aren’t sophisticated or paying attention. Even if tal@spamlemmy.example.com is taken, you can still be tal@kbin.social. I feel like the worst thing that could happen is the spiderman pointing meme with you and a bunch of bots.

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          1•11 months ago

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      • @PriorProject
        1•11 months ago

        Yeah, found this later in the day. It’s a good resource that discusses a wave of spambots hitting under-admin’ed instances.